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Could life have evolved on Mars before Earth?

New observations by NASA’s Curiosity rover suggest that microbial life could have survived on Mars in the distant past, when the Red Planet was a warmer and wetter place, scientists announced Tuesday (March 12).

It’s unclear exactly how long ago Mars’ habitability window opened up, researchers said. But the timing may be comparable to that of Earth, where life first appeared around 3.8 billion years ago.

“We’re talking about older than 3 billion years ago, and we’re probably looking at a situation where, plus or minus a couple hundred million years, it’s about the time that we start seeing the first record of life preserved on Earth,” Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, said during a press conference Tuesday.

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The grand collision that formed the Moon would have wiped out any life that existed on Earth up to the point. Then it took a long time for the Earth to cool again enough for conditions to once again permit life to form. During that whole window, Mars might well have formed life. It’s not impossible.

I’ll bother to think about it once they show Mars had life. If it did, it may have been a very very short window of life if scientists are correct that Mars lost it’s magnetoshpere about 4 billion years ago.

Find evidence of life that is even remotely plausible to anyone with more brain cells than liveasaslaveanddie and we’ll talk. And since you’ll find such evidence around the time you find the “gay gene”…

The grand collision that formed the Moon would have wiped out any life that existed on Earth up to the point. Then it took a long time for the Earth to cool again enough for conditions to once again permit life to form. During that whole window, Mars might well have formed life. It’s not impossible.

Steven Den Beste on March 13, 2013 at 7:54 PM

I read recently that cosmologists now think it actually formed 2 smaller moons that eventually combined to form the one we see today. I think life is rampant throughout the universe. It makes no sense that our little rock is the only place it ever arose. With the discovery of more and more extremophiles here on earth, it just stands to reason that life can find a way to grow and spread elsewhere. Maybe nowhere else in THIS solar system, but certainly others.

Yeah sure it could have. The conditions to support life as we understand once existed there. However the conditions also exist for Barry to hit 12 holes-in-one in a single game of golf. Lots of people who are ignorant of science assume that because something hypothetically could have happened, that it did. Or that there is a very strong chance that it did. Doesn’t work that way.

Yeah sure it could have. The conditions to support life as we understand once existed there. However the conditions also exist for Barry to hit 12 holes-in-one in a single game of golf. Lots of people who are ignorant of science assume that because something hypothetically could have happened, that it did. Or that there is a very strong chance that it did. Doesn’t work that way.

Daikokuco on March 13, 2013 at 10:11 PM

Exactly. “Possible” and “reasonably likely” are, public ignorance to the contrary, polar opposites.

Some of Darwinian theory is at least possible. It is however so unlikely that you’d see the resident trolls grow a brain and getalife before so much as a single-celled organism came to being on it’s own by random chance.

Even looking at Mars now – it hasn’t gone from barren to possibly being able to support life, it’s gone the other way around. In other words, gone from more to LESS complex on it’s own. Literally the entire planet itself is mute testimony to the absurdity that lifeforms can become more complex on their own.